Raising Money for Causes

Four teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood, and eminently well to do, were out on the pavement raising money for children struck with cancer. They had been out raising money for a couple of hours, and from a glance at their tin pot, I estimated that they had raised about $30 odd dollars, likely less. Assuming donation rate stays below $30/hr, or more than what they would earn if they were all working minimum wage jobs, I couldn’t help but wonder if their way of raising money for charity was rational; they could have easily raised more by donating their earnings from doing minimum wage job. Of course, these teenagers aren’t alone. Think of the people out in the cold raising money for the poor on New York pavements. My sense is that many people do not think as often about raising money by working at a “regular job”, even when it is more efficient (money/hour) (and perhaps even more pleasant). It is not clear why.

The same argument applies to those who run in marathons etc. to raise money. Preparing and running in marathon generally costs at least hundreds of dollars for an average ‘Joe’ (think about the sneakers, the personal trainers that people hire, the amount of time they `donate’ to train, which could have been spent working and donating that money to charity etc.). Ostensibly, as I conclude in an earlier piece, they must have motives beyond charity. These latter non-charitable considerations, at least at first glance, do not seem to apply to the case of teenagers, or to those raising money out in the cold in New York.